Shooting the Moon

This has not been a boring few weeks for theater people. It seems like every company in the three counties has decided that late February is the best possible time to open a show. Recent weeks have seen openings at Mad Cat Theatre, New Theatre, Actor's Playhouse, Broward Stage Door, the M Ensemble, the Promethean Theatre, Mosaic Theatre, the Women's Theatre Project, Sol Theatre, Caldwell Theatre, Palm Beach Dramaworks, and probably a few others. Some have been reviewed in these pages already, some will be tackled now, and some will have to wait for next week. And some unlucky few will be ignored totally, which is tragic but unavoidable. Nobody forced the silly bastards to plan this weird theatrical jubilee. It just worked out that way.

Not so the show. Dirty Story is full of Mr. Shanley's bile, and while it may be inadvisable to blast a Pulitzer Prize winner's attempt at daring political allegory, I do wish the guy would relax. Most plays have a point: Some hint at it, some stab you with it, and others grind it down until it is about as sharp as a ball bearing and then try stabbing you with that. Dirty Story is an example of the latter, and it's too bad. If director Kim St. Leon can manage an 11th-hour, triage-style edit on her show — by trimming, say, five minutes from the first act and about 20 from the second — she'll have a real monster on her hands.

Because Shanley's idea is, as you'd expect from a playwright of his talent, a good one. The first act is a weird shaggy-dog story about a would-be writer trying to suss some approval out of a philosophically inclined social critic/poet whom she idolizes. She is overly gawky; he is overly dismissive; everything is overly talky. Act I of Dirty Story is the parley of cartoons, filled with windy proclamations like: "Ah, coincidence — the refuge of the unimaginative conversationalist!" Now, plenty of smart people will occasionally chuck such nuggets into actual conversations, especially if they're drunk. But a conversation created entirely from those nuggets — especially a conversation about aesthetics and the functions of modern literature — is painfully boring, not to mention contrived. One wonders if that poor slob didn't fake a heart attack on opening night just to break up the monotony.

Fear not, though. Very soon, all of this windy discussion takes a back seat to ball gags, nipple clamps, electric saws, and rape. Then comes intermission, and by that point, you're pretty confident that your evening will be a good one. The endless prattling about literature and art and meaning was all a wind-up, you realize, to a genuine freak show.

Wrong again. Act II rolls out, and by then, the real meaning of the piece is within reach. I promise I am ruining nothing by telling you that the characters in Act II of Dirty Story are not in fact characters but countries. The bitchy has-been poet is now Palestine (Stephen G. Anthony), the whiny would-be poetess is Israel (Natasha Sherritt), her cowboy ex-boyfriend is the U.S.A. (Erik Fabregat), and his ass-kissing little acolyte is the U.K. (Kevin Reilly). See? Dirty Story really is a clever idea, and nobody knows it better than John Patrick Shanley. Sometime near the end of the play, it becomes apparent that all of the windy art-talk in the first act was Shanley building the case for his political satire in the second. Since most playwrights would rather build their cases in private, figure Shanley was so overcome with his own cleverness that he felt the need to let us in on his "process." Which is interesting. Or offensive. Take your pick.

I'll go with the former, if only because Shanley's ideas are worth kicking around, no matter how bloated the ego presenting them. In act one, Palestine — or Brutus, as he is called — is lecturing fair Israel on "the story-telling impulse" and suggesting some relationship between the species' common narrative archetypes and the way historical impulses are played out in the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...